apa Wieck, much as he liked the
young composer who had so long been his pupil and a member of his family
circle. The father of Clara looked forward to a brilliant artistic
career for his daughter, perhaps hoped to marry her to some serene
highness, and Schumann's prospects were as yet very uncertain. So he
took Clara on a long artistic journey through Germany, with a view of
quenching this passion by absence and those public adulations which he
knew Clara's genius would command. But nothing shook the devotion of
her heart, and she insisted on playing the compositions of the young
composer at her concerts, as well as those of Beethoven, Liszt, and
Chopin, the latter two of whom were just beginning to be known and
admired.

Hoping to overcome Papa Wieck's opposition by success, Schumann took
his new journal to Vienna, and published it in that city, carrying on
simultaneously with his editorial duties active labors in composition.
The attempt to better his fortunes in Vienna, however, did not prove
very successful, and after six months he returned again to Leipzig.
Schumann's generous sympathy with other great musicians was signally
shown in his very first Vienna experiences, for he immediately made
a pious pilgrimage to the Waehring cemetery to offer his pious gift of
flowers on the graves of Beethoven and Schubert. On Beethoven's grave
he found a steel pen, which he preserved as a sacred treasure, and used
afterward in writing his own finest musical fancies. He remembered, too,
that the brother of Schubert, Ferdinand, was still living in a suburb
of Vienna. "He knew me," Schumann says, "from my admiration for his
brother, as I had publicly expressed it, and showed me many things. At
last he let me look at the treasures of Franz Schubert's compositions,
which he still possesses. The wealth that lay heaped up made me shudder
with joy, what to take first, where to cease. Among other things, he
also showed me the scores of several symphonies, of which many had never
been heard, while others had been tried, but put back, on the score of
their being too difficult and bombastic." One of these symphonies, that
in C major, the largest and grandest in conception, Schumann chose
and sent to Leipzig, where it was soon afterward produced under
Mendelssohn's direction at one of the Ge-wandhaus concerts, and produced
an immediate and profound sensation. For the first time the world
witnessed, in a more expanded sphere, the powers of a